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Game Boy Tarot Project Update

Photo of The Fool and The Magician cards of my gameboy tarot deck leaning against a white tuck box. The rest of the deck is facedown so the back is visible.

Looping GIF of a Game Boy ROM being emulated on a Game Boy emulator. The "Nintendo" logo scrolls down from the top of the screen to the middle of the screen, then the screen clears and a card is show. More cards are shown one at a time one after each other, clearing the screen before showing each card. The order of the cards is "The Fool", "The Magician", then "The High Priestess".

Wanted to make an update about my Game Boy tarot card project. On February 9th, I had posted that I only had 17 of 78 cards done, with 8 of those card designs having been done between 2022 and the end of 2023. I got motivated to finish up a bunch of cards per week and ended up finishing all of the designs on April 9th. Since then, I got a physical deck made, which is shown in the attached image, and I have started on the Game Boy ROM. In order to fit all of the card designs, each which take up 2560 bytes of 2bpp tile data, I am using the Wisdom Tree Game Boy mapper. I already have experience making a Wisdom Tree compatible mapper NES cartridge PCB, so I figured I may as well use that experience here. The Wisdom Tree Game Boy mapper was used for a few Bible themed unlicensed Game Boy games that were sold at Christian Bookstores. I figure if the entirety of the KJV bible can be stored and accessed on a single ROM chip, all of these card designs could be stored too. The cartridge will probably end up using a 1MB flash ROM chip with support for 32 x 32KB banks, although the cartridge would support up to 8MB for flash ROM size, so 256 x 32KB banks.

I'm planning on having at least 2 or 3 different tarot reading spreads. I'm also planning on adding Game Boy printer support so folks can print the card designs along with print out a "Daily Reading" summary. At some point I plan on making the cartridge available, although it'll probably end up being through some publisher rather than independently for a limited physical run with an included printed deck.

LR35902 ASM is a bit more different than I initially expected compared to 6502 ASM, so it'll take me a little bit of time to get used to the quirks of the Game Boy before I make a ton of progress on the ROM. Took me quite a long time 2 or 3 days ago to figure out why interrupts were behaving in unexpected ways until I finally read about the halt bug and figured out that I ran into it independently (I appreciate that BGB emulated the hardware bug properly so I wouldn't run into that issue first on physical hardware).

Posted in: s/gameboy

☀️ vi

Apr 23 · 2 weeks ago · 👍 skyjake, wasolili, Ruby_Witch, norayr, sugar, bubstance, Silo

2 Comments ↓

🍄 Ruby_Witch · Apr 23 at 12:36:

It looks like a really awesome project so far, keep up the good work!

🐙 norayr · Apr 26 at 21:34:

omg, this is so beautiful.